This article is excerpted from John A. Jenkins’s book The Litigators, which is being published this month by Doubleday. Copyright 1989 by John A. Jenkins.
Automobile accidents, unsafe products, workplace accidents, plane crashes, and medical malpractice are the sordid stuff of Corboy’s lucrative practice, and in a career that spans a third of a century he has redefined the art of personal-injury law, taking each desperate case of human suffering and molding it into a commodity marketable to any jury in Cook County.
“If Iacocca gets hurt and he’s hurt in the city of Chicago and he talks around and finds out who the best lawyer in the city of Chicago is, he’ll be happy to hire me. Particularly if he finds out that I’ve knocked off Ford and knocked off General Motors. But if he reads in the paper tomorrow, before he’s my client, that I got a big verdict against Ford, he’s affronted, isn’t he? He’s terrified that it’s going to affect his part of the establishment. But when he gets hurt, who’s he gonna hire?”
“I enjoy not having to be part of the establishment. But certainly I enjoy the benefits of it. It’s fun tweaking them! I can say to them: ‘When you need me, I’m here–and I’ll be glad to help you, even though you’re the first to criticize me.’”
And yet, even though it churns out big settlements and verdicts with such apparent efficiency, there is also a familial air to the place. It is a haven for the Irish and the Catholic–for people, like Corboy, whose blood is red instead of blue. Thomas Demetrio, Corboy’s 42-year-old partner, is like a son to him, and except for a one-year judicial clerkship Demetrio has been working for the firm ever since he graduated from law school. But Corboy had known him long before that, because Demetrio’s father operated the restaurant in Corboy’s office building.
Corboy, 56 years old and going through a messy divorce when he moved into Water Tower Place in 1981, knocked out some walls and turned the place into a chrome-and-glass bachelor pad with a Matt Helm-style bedroom, a giant Jacuzzi (“Don’t ask me how many people it’ll fit!”), and a commanding view of Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michlgan. As a boy, he wore hand-me-downs from his cousin; but now, in the cedar-lined walk-in closet in his bedroom, there hang 10 silk bathrobes, 36 fine shirts, and dozens of custom-tailored suits. This man on a perpetual diet–he carries 168 pounds on his five-foot-eight frame–keeps no food in his kitchen. If Corboy wants something, he calls room service at the Ritz-Carlton. And he has no booze, either, having forsworn the stuff in 1977. “I figured if you were an Irishman and you hadn’t drunk enough by the age of 50, there was no hope for you!”
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The insurance company hired a lawyer for McCray and the clinic named Roger O’Reilly. He was an experienced trial advocate from Wheaton, 51 years old, shortish, squat, and freckled, with big, bushy eyebrows and red hair going to gray. O’Reilly’s style, in conversation and in the courtroom, was a low-key counterpoint to the stentorian Corboy’s.
